Show HN: Document and automate your operations playbooks and business processes
workflow86.com
workflow86.com
All teams develop specific ways of doing things - how they handle pull requests, respond to incidents, handle bugs, hire new employees etc. These processes are important, but they often don't get documented, rely on lots of manual handling, and jump between multiple SaaS tools.
Workflow86 is an all-in-one platform for building, automating, and managing your team’s operations playbooks and business processes. It comes with lots of built-in functionality so you can do more with just Workflow86, while still making it super easy to integrate with other tools when needed.
You use drag and drop components to build out your process step by step with forms, business logic, document templates and more. It's no-code, so non-technical team members (bizops, HR, admin, legal, risk and compliance) can set up playbooks and processes on their own.
Once a playbook/process has been built, you can run them automatically and at scale. Trigger playbooks automatically on a specific event, time, submission.
I also noticed that sometimes the problem is a lack of established playbooks/processes to begin with. So Workflow86 also comes with a bunch of pre-made playbooks you can download and run straight away in areas ranging from Cybersecurity to COVID-19 response. This is the other big feature of Workflow86 - the ability to easily package and then share entire playbooks and processes like a Notion doc.
Try it out and send any feedback our way.
My company just started using Power Automate and Power Apps, and after getting over the initial learnings, we have found a plethora of processes that are due for being automated and best of all, we have found that our employees quickly grasp how to apply it to their own domain of expertise. That rings true empowerment.
Your project looks even more refined than Power Automate and Power Apps! Good job.
After reading your top comment, it got me thinking about the world of SaaS and no-code products like yours working together. It seems products like Zapier are used to automate and share data between apps, but that type of integration seems to require connections between each pair of products. Smaller products might get left out. Could there be demand for a product that maintains data in a middle ground between a set of products, allowing for a hub and spoke model of managing data? This would move the source of truth to a middle ground that could be easily shared, if the right no-code management layer existed on top of it. Maybe something like this already exists?
Good luck, your product looks great! I look forward to seeing how the world is changed by the democratization of creating apps.
The lack of a "source of truth" is definitely one issue we identified with many processes. If your process is 8+ different SaaS tools duct taped together, maintaining consistency in data as it travels from app to app is always going to be challenging.
[1] https://n8n.io/
n8n has more of a focus on integrations/piping data between different external SaaS tools. Our focus is on performing more of the tasks/operations natively so you can build, run and manage more of your process in place.
The other, semi-related feature I crave is the ability to generate entire documents from piecemeal templates. For example, drafting a new service contract where there are boilerplate paragraphs that must be included, with certain aspects replaceable (i.e. "Party 1" in the template can be replaced with "Bill's Plumbing, Inc."). Probably need to throw a force majeure clause in there, and an arbitration clause, and a bunch of other standard things, but maybe this particular document needs to have a clause about compliance with FAA regulations because they use drones to inspect piping.
For those purposes, some nice haves are: Automatic renumbering of sections and subsections, and automatic reference updating ("In accordance with section 5(f)(i) documented herein" or whatever) if paragraphs or sections are reordered for any reason. Multiple columns and sections, recognition of the occasional need to print hard copies. Version control and diffing.
Not sure if any of that makes sense or is doable already, but just a few thoughts on how I would personally use such a system as I understand it. Might not apply to the use case here, in which case sorry for wasting your time!
"does this product incorporate any sort of digital signature / approval process?"
We have a component dedicated to building out approval steps and plan to integrate a way for users to "digitally sign off" that they completed it. Happy to chat through this use case, and we can build it out for you?
"generate entire documents from piecemeal templates"
You can indeed generate documents from templates using our Document Editor component with logic to select certain clauses etc. We've actually got a playbook for generating Non-Disclosure Agreements you can try out to see it in action: https://app.workflow86.com/template/dba33e59-e4a2-422f-9460-...
Also, Business processes are not static. I would like to understand how changes in process are managed.
We've got a component called the Assign Task that was pretty much built for this - its pretty flexible, but it is mainly used to create authorisation/control/approval/decision points in a workflow.
Here's an example for a process to handle timesheets: https://app.workflow86.com/template/812aaa61-8e00-414d-9898-...
The Assign Task component acts as a step where you can accept or reject the timesheet that has been submitted.
The Assign Task component is probably our most popular component and I'd be happy to show how you can use it for controls/checkpoints in your use case.
"Business processes are not static. I would like to understand how changes in process are managed."
All workflows are version controlled. This means that when a workflow starts, it is attached to a particular version e.g. version 5. This means if you make changes to the workflow i.e. update to version 6, the workflow currently in progress remains at version 5 so nothing breaks. We are looking into the possibility of migrating in progress sessions from one version to another.
It has all of your stated problems solved and comes with a fair cost.
You sound like you’re targeting smaller businesses with less complex processes that might not be fully established in existing systems. I can definitely see the niche there. Best of luck to you!
Our focus is on consolidating and running as much of the core operations and logic in a playbook or process in one platform. This means you can build, run and manage more of your operations from one centralized "command center" rather than having to glue multiple SaaS tools together to achieve the same thing.
You can of course still integrate with other apps, and we actually have a Zapier integration for users who don't want to use our more technical webhook and API modules.
At first blush, I can't work out how a website would be particularly helpful in orchestrating those type of actions.
Can you give some examples of "operations" that fall right in your wheelhouse?
For many teams, these processes are undocumented or loosely documented, so what needs to be done, in what order and when is difficult to understand, manage and scale.
Workflow86 allows you to document and map out these processes with modules that can automate parts of the process (e.g. calculations, logic, sending emails, making API requests) or request human input (e.g. approvals, review, decision making). Once you've build out a process, you essentially have a functional piece of software that when started, can run that process from start to finish for you.
One example that we use internally is this process for PR requests: https://app.workflow86.com/template/2b9ae31f-d29d-4198-a7b2-...
Here we've taken the "checklist" which we might have otherwise stored say in Confluence, and turned it into am interactive form instead. When the form is submitted, a further checklist is assigned for the dev to complete once merged into prod. Email notifications and slack messages are automated along the way to keep the team informed. There is some logic to see if it rates as potentially risky and warning notifications accordingly.
And here is another for handling data breach response: https://app.workflow86.com/template/26d48842-26cd-48bb-af51-...
Based on feedback, we'll likely separate out pricing based on user role i.e. a per editor/admin/builder user seat price and a much lower bulk price for 10/100/1000 end user seats.
Seriously though, visual coding/drag and drop etc are great for non-technical users but in my experience the issue isn't code vs. icons. I worked in corporate workflow development for around 15 years using guess what, Lotus Notes, and the 'real' problem was getting end users to think programmatically, not remember syntax / tools. You can have all the easy to use tools in the world, but you still need to really be able to think through a process.
And I have come across many a Big 4 consulting team still running on Lotus Notes :)